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I met a young man on a plane last night and I asked him about his feeling regarding Iraq. Without a hesitation he said "We need to take him out." His girl friend sitting next to him cheered him on. I struggled with how do I talk about this issue with him. I tried to listen carefully to what his arguments were. They went something like this: 1. We gotta get him before he gets us. 2. This man is so evil that he gasses his own people. 3. Somebody has to do it. He was a young man of apparent intelligence. He was raised a Canadian and was working in the US as an engineer. I didnąt want to argue with him but I did try and ask him a few questions and listen to his responses. 1. Should we do the same thing with Iran, N.Korea and Syria? Yes 2. Should we do the same thing with China? We canąt win a land war there because there are so many people in China. We need to defend ourselves against them attacking us but probably can't invade them? 3. If you were the military in Iraq, would you want to fight a conventional war against the US? No that would be crazy. I was happy. I had made a few points that I think registered on the man and I retreated back to my private space by ignoring his Canadian reference and asking, You must be glad that the draft is gone? And then commenting, war is very much romanticized by the young. It is very unpredictable and once started no one really knows what the consequences of it will be. I learned again from this little encounter that sometimes the best that you can do is sow a little doubt into someone who is not open to hearing a more complex story. We live in a time when our leaders are committed to going to war and they are prepared to go to any lengths to convince us that we need to follow them. The rhetoric continued this week with statements that we now have proof from unknown prisoners living under secret conditions that Saddam is supporting terrorists. This is possibly true. But we will never know and our government is very capable of lying to us in order to create support for the actions they have decided that we must support. They are so effective at this that they have marginalized any serious debate. I guess all I can do against all that is to continue sowing a little bit of doubt to people that I meet. I know the world is not that simple. September 26th, 2002 |
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